Doc Rivers appears to suggest Donald Sterling squelched several great Clipper trades
The ‘Doc Rivers is a fine coach, but Doc Rivers is also a terrible general manager’-summation has been out there for so long, mostly because it is provable, that we were almost certain to hear some backlash at some point. You just knew that some contrarian would eventually come out to defend Rivers’ moves as head personnel chief of the Los Angeles Clippers, a position he took over in the summer of 2013, when Donald Sterling was still the owner of the team.
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We just didn’t know, though we probably should have, that the contrarian backlash would come from Rivers himself.
From a radio interview with Fred Roggin at Beast 890, via Deadspin and CBS Sports:
“This is really only my third year but you can make a case this is our second year if you know what I’m saying,” Rivers told Beast 980’s Fred Roggin. “If I someday wrote a book and told you a couple of the trades we had in the first year that we didn’t do because of other reasons, you would fall off your chair.”
Roggin, understandably, asked him elaborate:
When Roggin asked Rivers to get specific and tell him about some of these potential trades, Rivers just laughed him off and said, “I’m too young. Not yet.”
All manner of NBA trades briefly live and finally die silently at the hand of a team’s owner. They have the final on all personnel matters, even the most distant owners have to have some representation in the process, and these potential deals slip away for all manner of reasons – too much money, “I don’t like the guy,” “I really like this guy and don’t want to lose him” – from owners both good and bad.
Sterling was a bad owner. Forgetting for a second just how bad a person he is (also, hey, don’t forget that they NBA let Shelly Sterling stay on with the Clippers! Shelly Sterling, this person, is associated with the NBA!), he meddled in countless acquisitions during his tenure with the team, he waited decades to spend competitively on players, and personnel boss hires were either hamstrung by their own poor choices or Sterling’s bad influence or both.
Fine. He was awful.
Doc Rivers’ biggest trade as personnel head of the Los Angeles Clippers, however, was made during the 2013 offseason, with Sterling as owner. In a three-way deal, he sent Eric Bledsoe and Caron Butler to Phoenix, some second-round picks to Milwaukee, while taking in a signed-and-traded J.J. Redick and Jared Dudley from the Bucks.
Even with the acknowledgment that Bledsoe was clearly the best player in the deal, it felt like a good trade at the time. Bledsoe was never going to be effective either in spot minutes behind Chris Paul, or in a shared backcourt with the (rightful) ball-dominator in CP3. The Clippers badly needed spacing offensively (that’s where Redick would step up), and they needed a two-way swingman like Dudley to patch up what was an ugly hole at small forward.
Everyone knew that Bledsoe would go off in Phoenix, and he did. Nobody knew that Dudley would actually play worse than the 32-year old Butler did the season before in Los Angeles, and that Redick would take a season and a half with the Clippers to find his footing.
This was a big trade. It cost the team picks, it cost the team money (even if the Clippers would have eventually had to pay Bledsoe big cash), and it cost the team one of their more excitable players in Bledsoe.
You’re telling me that Donald Sterling sat on even bigger deals? Involving whom? Chris Paul? Blake Griffin? DeAndre Jordan for Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili?
Los Angeles’ roster was just as top-heavy then as it is now, and the team’s draft picks were always going to be high with that high-end core hanging around. There weren’t exactly a lot of assets to dangle in this Major Unnamed Trade That Doc Rivers Is Waiting To Write About Someday for Sterling to squash, unless Rivers was talking about dealing one of his Big Three.
Since then, the team has signed an endless array of veterans to minimum deals that haven’t panned out – Hedo Turkoglu, Glen Davis, Danny Granger – it dealt for Rivers’ son Austin Rivers, who had one great game but mostly played terribly, and it had to pawn off Dudley on the Bucks last summer. Dudley responded with his best season in years, and the Bucks received a future first-round pick for their efforts – top 14 protected from 2017-19, years that the Clippers could very well fall into the lottery.
The Spencer Hawes signing was the second biggest bust of the 2014 offseason, and he was dealt this week for the biggest bust of the 2014 offseason: Lance Stephenson, along with Barnes. The Clippers currently have no real small forward, and Rivers swears he’s not going to put Stephenson into that slot. If the team re-signs free agent DeAndre Jordan to the contract he wants this summer, it will have a hell of a time navigating around salary cap laws to add the depth they badly need.
Maybe Donald Sterling did some prevent some wham-o deals, only approving a transaction involving J.J. Redick. Maybe Doc Rivers had to work in quicksand with Sterling.
Go ahead and write that book, then, Doc. Don’t worry. It’s not like Donald Sterling is litigious or anything.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
